


Home

by peterplanet



Category: tom holland - Fandom
Genre: Angst, F/M, Some Fluff, but mainly angst soz :/
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-08 14:59:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18625606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peterplanet/pseuds/peterplanet
Summary: in which you find that home is more than places and seek refuge in tom





	1. series teaser

home is more than places. it is people. it is laughter bubbling from tom’s lips when he sees his name on the computer screen, sees his name as the new spider-man.

home is the first fight that you get into as a couple. it is heated words and angry eyes as tom calls you dumb and as you call him immature. it is the make-up afterwards. it is the gentle touches and hesitant apologies, the laughter spilling from your lips as you remember the insults that felt like bullets but in a clear-minded reality don’t make any sense at all.

home is tom. it is his family, his friends. it is within his laughter, within his sleepy smile when he wakes up to catch you staring at him. it is snapshots of happiness, instances of kindness and pure joy between you both.

home is where your heart is, and it just so happens that your heart is with tom.


	2. Chapter 2

She wakes up one day to the realization that she is in love with him. They say that love doesn’t happen overnight, that an attachment so strong to one person is impossible to form with little to no time. And maybe it didn’t.

Maybe she didn’t fall in love with him the night before. But, as she sees his head on the pillow next to hers, she realizes that he has become more than just her boyfriend. Slowly but surely, Tom has become her home. He’s the person she wants to see at the end of a long day. He’s the person that she wants to vent to about the silly, minor things that irked her throughout the day. He’s the person that she imagines spending her entire life with. He’s her person. He’s her home.

And maybe it’s dumb of her to be expecting him to return these feelings when they’ve only been dating for three months. They’re just kids—twenty-one-year-olds with their whole lives ahead of them. Tom has his entire career ahead of him to work towards, his entire future is so bright that sometimes it pains her to think about.

So, she doesn’t. She thinks about his hair and how it’s so annoyingly curly that he sometimes hates brushing it. She thinks about how she’ll brush it for him, comb her fingers through it first to warm him up to the idea of running a real one through it. She thinks about his groggy morning voice; how thick his accent gets with sleep and passion. She tries to remember the first time he called her love or the first time he called her darling and how soft it had made her so instantaneously.

She thinks about him, the man that has become more than her first love. He’s more than the boy she met three months ago, more than the boy that came up to her in the dairy section of the grocery store to help her get the ice cream on the top shelf at three in the morning. He’s more than all of that and it scares her.

She’s scared. She’s so, so scared to be in love with him because it’s blinding. When her heart beats only to the time of his name— _T-Tom, T-Tom, T-Tom_ —it means that he is her life-source. He’s enveloped her, surrounded her until she’s only loving for him. Until she’s only living for him. And that thought terrifies her.

When she was little, she always used to say that she’d never be the type of girl that needed a man with her. She could be her own person, she could find home within her own ribs. She could make her own happiness, be her own happiness without having to rely on someone else.

She had watched as friends and family fell in love, got married, and had kids. She’d caught bouquets at weddings before she met Tom and listened to giggly women tell her that she was going to find the love of her life. She’d listened as parents and family talked about how she was going to die alone, how she’d never find someone to love. And she hadn’t found any shame in that.

She was proud to be her own woman. So, what if she had been twenty and without a boyfriend? So, what if she didn’t have any children by the time she turned twenty-one? She had a career and a life ahead of her that didn’t require anyone but her within it in order for it to be successful.

And then, she had met Tom. She’d been at the grocery store after writing a term paper at three in the morning, desperate for some ice cream to celebrate by herself. It had been a hell of a lot of work, deadlines and a research journal before she’d even written the paper that had composed a decent part of her grade. And she’d done it.

But, the only quart of her favorite ice cream had been on the top shelf. No one goes to the grocery store at three in the morning, she reasoned, so she’d have to do it by herself. Not even a reasonably tall person could reach it with how many shelves there were in the freezer and it had begun to piss her off. She’d climbed the shelves, unaware that Tom had been there, watching her the whole time.

“Quite a show you put on there, love,” he’d teased with a grin when she’d finally come back down.

“Shut up,” she’d laughed, cheeks red from the effort and the embarrassment.

He was attractive as ever. Hair messy, eyes rimmed with bags from a layover that she had yet to learn of. He wore a white shirt, she remembered, and some loose-fitting joggers. And, while messy, she’d been distracted by the simplicity of him.

He looked to be the type of man that she’d meet at a bar for a one-night stand, seemed to be a natural flirt. He seemed, to her, to have a heart surrounded by iron walls that he didn’t want anyone to crack. And it was this simplicity, his simple complexity, that had made her want to get to know him even more.

“They only ever keep this type on the top shelf and it’s my favorite,” she explains. “I just wrote a term paper and submitted it three days before it was due so…And you don’t need to know this, sorry.”

Her laugh is hesitant, airy as she ducks her head and lets out a soft breath. If she had been to look into Tom’s eyes, a warm caramel in the fluorescent lighting of the grocery store, she’d have seen that he was smiling at her. She would have seen that his eyes were soft, gentle as they studied the way she seemed to berate herself.

“’s actually my favorite, too,” he notes in a light tone that’s just catching the heaviness that comes with a sleepless night. “Just landed in London after being away for a while, couldn’t sleep, so, I thought I’d come here. Didn’t know I’d be getting to see a show, too.”

And, later on, Tom would admit to her that her favorite flavor was not his. He’d lied to her in that grocery store, made it up for her sake to make her feel a bit better about herself. If she had been listening, she would have recognized that as foreshadowing for what was to come. Maybe it was just his favorite ice cream flavor, but the lie had slipped so easily from his lips that the truth should have raised some red flags.

She’d found it romantic. It had been one of the sweetest things she’d heard someone do for her. It had made her laugh, cheeks flush when he admitted that he really actually loved vanilla. But, hindsight is twenty-twenty, and she wanted so badly to see him through a rose-colored tint.

So, she does. In the early-morning light of their bedroom, she sees him lying before her and thinks of how she’s found her home in him. To admit this to him would be terrifying, scary, and it makes her a little bit numb to think about. So, she’ll keep it to herself for now. Keep her love for him and the feelings that run deeper than that to her chest for as long as she can.

But, she’s never been very good at keeping secrets. And neither has Tom.    


	3. Chapter 3

It comes spilling out of her a week later. They’re sitting down, dinner on the table as Tom tells her about his day on set. He’s been busy filming his second Spider-Man movie, Far from Home, and they’re about to leave for Prague soon.

She wanted him to come over for dinner before he left, have one last nice night with him before he’s gone for the next few months. It’s going to be hard, she reasons. Harder than anything she’s ever done before, harder than anything she ever will do. To separate herself from her home, to willingly let him leave will destroy her. 

The basis of their relationship is shaky. She doesn’t know if he’ll stay with her while he’s away or what his plans are. She wants to stay with him, wants to be the reason that he comes back. She wants him to find a home in her, wants to be part of the reason that he comes back to London after filming abroad for the next few months. They haven’t been together long enough to break up, she rationalizes, and to do so would break her into pieces.

It is these thoughts, these moments that she will come back to in the months to come. Maybe, if she hadn’t found a home in him or placed such a deep value in a singular person, a human person, things would have been different. Maybe, she wouldn’t have been so hurt and jaded by his future words and actions. Things would be so much simpler, she will come to rationalize, if she just took a situation for what it was worth.

“Some of the cast is going out tonight to celebrate our last night in London,” he says as she hands him a plate of the dinner she worked so hard to make. “I’ll be eating there.”

It’s such a simple concept that could have been avoided if she had just communicated. So, she blames herself for this instance. She swallows down the hurt that he creates and places it in her chest, reasoning that she’ll talk to him about it later. He’s had a long day, a stressful day, and she doesn’t want to be the reason that he dreads coming home. She wants to be a safe-haven for him, a reason for him to keep fighting through his darkest and worst days. But sometimes expectations are too great to ever become a reality.

When he has his things together for the night and two plates of lasagna are going cold on her dining room table, he presses a quick kiss to her lips. He turns towards the door and bids her farewell and the words that she’s wanted to say all day die on her tongue as she watches him leave. It is to a closed door that she whispers the heavy truth, to a closed door that she admits what’s been plaguing her.

“You’re my home.”

* * *

He comes home later that night drunk beyond recognition. She allows herself for a moment—for a stupidly foolish moment—to believe in the fact that he came back to her apartment because he seeks refuge in her. Perhaps this isn’t as one-sided as she feels it is. Perhaps this is something more to him, too. For a moment she allows his drunken stupor to mean something, she allows his drunken refuge to mean that he loves her.

She will come to look back on this moment as the last moment that she was in love with him. She will come to look back on this moment as the first time that she took off the rose-tinted glasses with which she viewed him. But, once more, hindsight is twenty-twenty, and she will never forgive herself for the time that she wasted on him.

Because he smells like perfume. When she gets closer to him, she smells the perfume on his collar and lets the weight sink into her stomach. The weight smells like floral perfume and looks like the lipstick stains on his collar. But she can’t bring it up now, not like this. Not when he’s drunk and she’s going off of sensory details and not the facts that she needs from his lips. 

So, she guides him to bed and prays that this will not be the last night that he comes home to her. She prays that this will not be the last night that she finds home in him.


	4. Chapter 4

It is in his hesitance the next morning that she knows. It is in the spaces he has left between them, the drunken gaps that clouded his judgment that she realizes he cannot be her home anymore. He is not the man that she fell in love with.

He has torn himself to shreds and lost himself. He has destroyed the love that she built her image of him upon. He has destroyed the home in which she placed her heart.

“We can fix this,” he begs over a cup of coffee.

She always knew how to make it for him. She knew exactly how he took it—three sugars and a little bit of milk to make it just a bit lighter—and this breaks him. She knew him so intimately, so well that she didn’t ever have to ask him how he took his coffee. She observed, watched him so keenly to know his intricacies.

And maybe that’s why they won’t work. Maybe that’s why she can’t fix this, why they can’t fix this. A home destroyed by a natural disaster can be rebuilt, but it will never be the same as it was all those years ago. It will never be the first home of a married couple, the first home that a child knew. It is on the same foundation, but it won’t have the same connotation.

And she knows that she built up unrealistic expectations of him. She expected too much from him, more than anyone should ever expect from a partner. Maybe she did not expect perfection, but she expected him to touch it. She wanted him to be close to it, to taste it so that she could feel it against her lips when they kissed.

“No,” she answers, voice level and steady despite the heat of this moment. “We can’t fix this. It’ll never be the same, Tom. How am I supposed to trust you? How am I supposed to fall asleep next to you when all it takes is, what, four shots for you to forget about me? I’m not going to be second best to the ideas you have of a bachelor lifestyle.”

“You won’t be second best.” He’s begging now and, in another timeline, another story, it would break her to see his brown eyes fill with tears. “You never were second best, I promise.”

It’s promises that do her in. He promised to be faithful, promised to take care of her, promised to come home to her. He promised this, and she hurts from the loss of it, the dull ache resounding in her chest as she struggles to admit that she was never his first choice. And why should she be?

“How are you supposed to sleep next to the girl that you cheated on?” She mumbles. Her voice is losing its tone, its edge. It’s dying in her throat and she wants it back, she’s begging to get it back. “Or sleep with her, for that matter?”

“We’ll get through this—” He’s cut off by the aspect of saying her name. 

Memories of the night before flood his mind. Soft touches, gentle flirting with a girl whose name he never cared to remember. It was desperate, taking until there was nothing left to give. And in that moment, Tom realizes that he always wanted her. Always. He has always wanted (Y/N), it just took losing her to know that.

And that’s selfish of him, he knows. He knows that it is disastrous of him to demand that she love him like that, to love him first when he put her second. She knew that she was second best. She always knew, and it was selfish of Tom to believe that he hadn’t done anything to make her feel that way.

It’s the dinner that he missed the night before. The lies he spilled in hopes of covering up his tracks. The dates he cancelled because of other plans. He put her in the back of his mind when she always kept him in the forefront of hers. It’s selfish of him to ask her to stay.

“We won’t, Tom.” Her words are level once more. He can’t say her name, can’t bring himself to speak it when it wasn’t the one that he was moaning the night before. And while he can’t remember the other girls name, she wonders if he even thought of her, his girlfriend, while he was with the other girl at the bar.

She wants to believe that he only thought of her. She wants to believe that he imagined her above him or beneath him as he made love to the other girl. She wants to believe that, but she can’t be selfish. Not now. Not when she needs to be calm, rationalized. 

She can cry later, she reasons. Now, there is no time for tears.

“You’re welcome to finish your coffee,” she says in a tone that is nothing less than amiable. “But, after, I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I can’t have you here anymore—this isn’t your home.”

And in saying that, she has begun to realize that he is no longer hers. It is the lesson that she learned all those years ago as a young girl, that home is where the heart is. Home is the reason that she won’t be able to come back to Kingston for the next year and a half. Home is the reason that she won’t be able to see a Blue Staffy anymore.

Home is where the heart is. She supposes that hers will have to begin to be within her own ribs.


End file.
